Tetra Pak urges manufacturing support as 61% warn UK food system is unprepared

Tetra Pak has called for stronger government support for food manufacturing after research commissioned by the company found that 61% of UK food business decision-makers believed the country’s food system was not well prepared for the challenges of the next decade.

• Survey finds 61% question UK food system preparedness.
• Tetra Pak proposes manufacturing incentives and an innovation fund.
• Recommendations include support for alternative protein scale-up.

The findings accompanied the company’s Food Fit for the Future report, released on October 26, which argued that processing and manufacturing should receive greater attention in efforts to protect food supplies. Almost seven in 10 respondents, 69%, said advances in manufacturing and processing would be as important to future food security as advances in agriculture.

Katrin Andersson, Managing Director of Tetra Pak North Europe, said advanced manufacturing had a central role in building “a food system that is more productive, sustainable, resilient and capable of delivering affordable and nutritious food”.

The company identified conflict, disrupted trade, extreme weather and energy costs among the pressures affecting supply, affordability and nutritional quality. Its recommendations sought to give manufacturers greater access to technology investment and make food security a more explicit consideration in policymaking.

Censuswide conducted the research for Tetra Pak among 500 UK food business decision-makers on August 11-17, 2026. Retail-only businesses were excluded.

The report proposed five measures: a Food Security Test for major policy changes, a permanent Food System Resilience Unit, an Advanced Food-Manufacturing Investment Allowance, inclusion of food manufacturing in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan, and a Food-Manufacturing Innovation Fund.

The proposed fund would help companies pilot, demonstrate and scale technologies, including AI, automation, resource recovery and advanced processing. It would also support healthier foods and new sources of nutrition, addressing the gap between research and commercial manufacturing.

An investment allowance would support adoption of proven equipment that improves productivity or resilience, while the cross-government unit would coordinate responsibilities across departments and monitor supply-chain vulnerabilities.

The Food Security Test would require policymakers to consider how major decisions affect food availability, access, utilization and stability. Tetra Pak argued that a change benefiting one part of the system could create additional costs or vulnerabilities elsewhere.

Daniel Zeichner MP, the UK’s former Food Security Minister, contributed the report’s foreword. He identified affordability, resource efficiency, resilience and nutritional value as challenges requiring attention, and supported closer coordination of government responsibilities.

The manufacturing argument also challenges the idea that domestic agricultural output alone guarantees secure supplies.

“For example, you can have 100% of wheat produced domestically, but if you don’t have processing for the flour, you can’t eat it,” Richard Ali, Tetra Pak’s Director of Corporate Affairs, Strategy and Stakeholder Relations, told FoodNavigator.

Ali’s example underlined the dependence of food availability on equipment and infrastructure between agricultural production and the finished product. In its interview, FoodNavigator also reported Tetra Pak’s call for investment that would allow smaller manufacturers to access new technologies, alongside larger businesses.

Tetra Pak has been expanding its own facilities and equipment offering for fermentation-derived foods. Its
New Food Technology Development Centre in Karlshamn, Sweden, opened in June 2025 to help biomass and precision fermentation producers develop processes, assess equipment needs and reduce investment risk.

The center offers process evaluation for companies moving from laboratory production toward demonstration scale, alongside productivity validation for businesses with established processes. Producers can test upstream and downstream operations and compare technologies before committing to production equipment.

That work was followed by the July 2026 launch of the Tetra Pak Bioreactor RF, following the acquisition of Bioreactors.net. The platform targets fermentation-derived ingredients, with capacities ranging from 10 to 50,000 liters.

Tetra Pak said the common platform was intended to support production from pilot validation through industrial manufacturing, using consistent control logic and operating principles. The company reported potential reductions of up to 12% in operating costs and up to 8% in investment costs compared with conventional systems.

Under the report’s proposals, public innovation funding would extend to demonstrating that new food processes can produce safely, consistently and affordably at commercial scale.

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